HHS Re-releases Document Claiming to Review Youth Gender Medicine
The original release did not include the names of the authors, who include conservative and anti-trans activists.
by Evan Urquhart
The HHS has re-released a May document claiming to be a review of the evidence on gender-affirming care for youth on Wednesday, November 19. This document, which is largely unchanged from the first draft, which Assigned covered in May, mainly differs by including the names of the authors as well as a supplemental section with comments from people selected by HHS to review it, described in the press release as peer reviewers.
The authors include MIT philosophy professor Alex Byrne, who wrote a 2023 book disputing the reality of trans identities as well as Leor Sapir of the conservative Manhattan Institute and Evgenia Abbruzzese of the anti-trans advocacy group SEGM. Other authors include Farr Curlin, Moti Gorin, Kristopher Kaliebe, Michael K. Laidlaw, Kathleen McDeavitt, and Yuan Zhang.
The comments of the peer reviewers include one highly critical response by the APA, which stated that, “while the HHS Report purports to be a thorough, evidence-based assessment of gender-affirming care for transgender youth, its underlying methodology lacks sufficient transparency and clarity for its findings to be taken at face value.”
The other reviewers were uniformly effusive in their praise for the HHS document. These reviewers notably fail to include any experts in gender medicine and included Dr. Jilles Smids, a philosophy postdoc based in the Netherlands who discloses in his review that he “provided constructive critical feedback on an early version of chapter 13,” and Professor Karleen Gribble, from the School of Nursing and Midwifery at Western Sydney University.
In the standard peer review process for academic publications reviewers are typically anonymous. Such a process does not typically include people who had contributed comments to an early draft, and those involved in the research would never be in a position to handpick their reviewers.
Evan Urquhart is the founder of Assigned Media.